Bay Area Roundtable (BART)

Scaling for the Internet series, meeting 6

Component Technologies

Distributed Object Technology for Wide-Area Shared Decision-making
Dr. Fredrick ("Rick") Hayes-Roth, Chairman and CEO, Teknowledge Corp., rhayes-roth@teknowledge.com
Lou Coker, Project Leader, Teknowledge Corp., lcoker@teknowledge.com

We are employing distributed object technology to build a new generation of infrastructure for decision-making. In particular, DARPA has formulated a strategy for a Next Generation Information Infrastructure (NGII) that will augment and supersede the Defense Information Infrastructure now being deployed. Our company has provided the architecture and various components for this NGII. We began in 1994 by embracing the CORBA architecture (also known as the Object Management Architecture or OMA) and then proceeded to elaborate and refine it. Last year, we completed development of a third version of an "object web server" (OWS) that provides means for worldwide collaborators to create, modify, version, and partially replicate compound objects that correspond to decision products such as situation analyses and plans. Because the collaboration takes place over communication paths with up to five orders of magnitude speed and reliability variations, the entire system must be aware of and adaptive to variations in availability or quality of service. Beginning in 1998, we have begun to decompose the OWS into more composable elementary services. Later this year we will complete the first version of composable services for wide-area sharing of compound objects and will provide application frameworks that simplify the task of composing and employing these more elementary capabilities.

Biography: Frederick Hayes-Roth is Chairman and CEO of Teknowledge, where he has worked for 16 years since co-founding the company. He became Chairman and CEO in 1993. He was the company's Chief Technology Officer, R&D Director, and Executive Vice President for Technology prior to becoming Chairman and CEO. Currently, Dr. Hayes-Roth devotes much of his time to serving as Chief Architect for the DARPA-DISA Next-Generation Information Infrastructure and several other programs and projects related to this. These programs are intended to develop the Leading Edge Services for the U.S. Defense Information Infrastructure. He has focused on the architecture and implementation of distributed intelligent systems for almost two decades. His work along these lines includes a series of seminal and successful efforts, such as the Hearsay-II Speech Understanding System and its blackboard architecture, opportunistic planning and meta-control, distributed module-oriented programming supported by the ABE development environment, the real-time architecture for the Pilots' Associate, the DICAM architecture for distributed intelligent control, and the DARPA Joint Task Force Reference Architecture. Dr. Hayes-Roth has published two books and more than 100 articles and has held research faculty appointments at MIT, CMU, and Stanford.

Developing JavaBeans Components: An Overview
Reginald Adkins, JavaBeans Team, JavaSoft/Sun Microsystem, Inc., regman@eng.sun.com

The widespread adoption of the JavaTM programing language by the Internet community creates an opportunity for developers to create a new class of interactive applications. The language and environment specifications provide mechanisms for the creation and management of small reusable feature sets known as JavaBeans. The goal of the Beans architecture is to define a Java Platform component model so that third party ISV's can create and ship components composed together into applications by end users. Using Java RMI and Java RMI over IIOP allows for the possibility of distributing Bean functionality across platforms.

Biography: Reginald Adkins is the JavaBeans Team Beans Development Kit (BDK) Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He is responsible for the deployment of the BDK, as well as the implementation for the reference Bean container, the BeanBox. Prior to working at Sun on the Beans component software architecture, Reginald worked for three years at Apple Computer, Inc. on the multi-platform, CORBA compliant component software architecture, OpenDocTM. Before OpenDoc and other summer stints in Apple's Advanced Technology and Functional Technology Groups, Reginald worked for three years at NASA/Goddard in Greenbelt, MD in the data networks division. Reginald holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Drexel University, in Philadelphia, PA.

Coordinator: David Rosenblum, UC Irvine / IRUS, dsr@ics.uci.edu

Directions to meeting are available

Upcoming Meeting:

Friday, August 14, 1998
Topic: Scaling for the Internet series, meeting 7:
          Development Tools for Web Applications
Speaker: Bob Pasker, Chief Architect/Founder, WebLogic, Inc.
Coordinator: Tony Wasserman, Software Methods & Tools,
                      tonyw@methods-tools.com

The Irvine Research Unit in Software wishes to thank its corporate sponsors:

Sustaining:

The Boeing Company * Boeing North American, Inc. * Microsoft Corporation
Northrop Grumman Corporation * Raytheon Company * Sun Microsystems Laboratories * TRW

Supporting:

Beckman Coulter * FileNet Corporation * Printronix, Inc.*

Continuus Software Corporation * Hewlett Packard

For further information on BART or IRUS, contact
        Debra Brodbeck at (949) 824-2260; brodbeck@ics.uci.edu